“A lot of times your neighborhood, your town, your city is being invaded by people who you think are going to hurt your family, your society,” he says. “Well, then you have to act, because the government isn’t going to come help you.”
And there’s the premise of almost every superhero story ever written. Only the speaker isn’t from a comic book. He’s from Iguala, Mexico. Reporter E. Eduardo Castillo interviewed him for the Associated Press late last year (the article is here). “He would appear on camera wearing a ski mask,” explains Castillo, “and his voice would be distorted.” I can’t help but hear Stephen Amell’s distorted voice on Arrow. The set-up also reminds me of the Tom Bissell short story “My Interview with the Avenger” that appeared in the superhero issue of VQR a few years back (that’s Gary Panter’s drawing from the issue above).
Instead of a utility belt, Castillo’s interviewee “wears a bag with a strap over his chest in which he carries several walkie-talkies and cell phones, one of which he used to take calls and issue orders.” Instead of superpowers, “he usually carries a .38-caliber pistol and an AK-47 assault rifle.” He’s a killer—a trait that might put him in the same league as the Punisher or Steve Ditko’s The Question.
Here are more excerpts from Castillo’s article:
In recent years, residents of a number of towns and cities have taken up arms to protect themselves against drug cartels. “I can’t say I’m a vigilante,” says the killer, “but I am part of a group that protects people, an autonomous group of people who protect their town, their people.”
He says no one forced him to join his organization. His parents and siblings don’t know what he does. He raises cattle for a living. He isn’t married and has no children. Although he would like to have a family, he knows his future is uncertain. “I don’t really see anything,” he said. “I don’t think you can make plans for the future, because you don’t know what will happen tomorrow.”
“It’s not a pretty life,” he says. Life in an area torn by drug disputes is rarely pretty.
The killer has a grade-school education. He wanted to continue studying, but when he was a child there was no middle school in his town. “I would have liked to learn languages … to travel to other places or other countries. I would have liked that,” he said.
He acknowledges that what he does is illegal. He recognizes he would be punished if caught by the authorities. “For them, these (killings) are not justifiable under the laws we have, but my conscience – how can I put this – this is something that I can justify, because I am defending my family.”
He sometimes feels sorry about the work he does but has no regrets, he says, because he is providing a kind of public service, defending his community from outsiders.
If you take a standard definition of a superhero—I like Pete Coogan’s—Castillo’s interviewee seems to hit the mark. He uses his specialized skills to conduct a selfless, pro-social mission. Plus Castillo, like his reporter counterparts in so many comic book tales, provides his interviewee with a codename: The Killer. Though even with the mask, his “jeans and a camouflage T-shirt” aren’t your standard superhero costume, but he does wear a mission-defining iconic symbol on his forehead, the preferred placement before Joe Shuster drew an “S” on Superman’s chest. Castillo writes:
He wore a baseball cap with a badge bearing the face of Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and “prisoner 3578” – Guzman’s inmate number before he escaped through a tunnel from Mexico’s maximum-security prison in July, cementing his image as a folk hero.
Robin Hood was an outlaw folk hero too, but here things get a lot more complicated. Castillo’s killer works for a drug cartel.
Federal authorities told the AP that several drug gangs in Guerrero, including those that operate on the Costa Grande, act as self-defense groups to generate support from local residents.
“Of all the bad lot,” the killer said, Guzman “seems to be the least bad.”
In several cases, authorities have claimed these vigilantes are allied with rival gangs, and pass themselves off as self-defense groups to gain greater legitimacy.
He says he is defending his people against the violence of other cartels. Things would be much worse if rivals took over.
A rival gang, “would do worse damage.”
Superheroes tend to be more idealistic than that, but if the killer is looking at the big picture—like Ozymandias in Watchmen—is he still one of the pragmatic good guys? Since “violence spikes when cartels are fighting each other for control of territory,” is he making his community safer the only way he can?
Unfortunately, that way makes him “a man who kidnaps, tortures and kills for a drug cartel.”
The killer says he ‘disappeared’ a man for the first time at age 20. Nine years later, he says, he has eliminated 30 people – maybe three in error.
There are many reasons people are disappeared, the killer says. It may be for belonging to a rival gang, or for giving information to one. If a person is considered a security risk for any reason, he may be disappeared. Some are kidnapped for ransom, though he says he does not do this.
In fact, he maintains his own sense of morality in a variety of ways.
Some in his circumstances use drugs, but he says he doesn’t. “When people are on drugs, they’re not really themselves,” he says. “They lose control, their judgment.”
Unlike others, he says, he has standards: He doesn’t kill women or children. He doesn’t make his victims dig their own graves.
He doesn’t consider himself a drug trafficker or a professional killer, although he is paid for disappearing people. He does not see himself as bad.
He sometimes feels sorry about the work he does but has no regrets.
The problem is that people under torture sometimes admit to things that are not true: “They do it in hope that you will stop hurting them. They think it’s a way to get out of the situation.”
That may have happened to him three times, he says, leading him to kill the wrong men.
While Castillo’s interviewee provides a grotesque study in rationalization and self-deception, I’m equally disturbed by how well his tale parallels the tropes of superheroism and what those parallels suggest about the popularity of a genre about violent men who break the law while serving what they call the greater good.
(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)
It is ‘funny’ but the way he sees himself sounds a lot like the way todays ‘deep’ and ‘nuanced’ heroes are described. Like for instance, this comment about Netflix’ Daredevil:
“Or is your problem where the one scene he takes advice on how to cause the most pain from a nurse? The whole series shows his struggle with him justifying his actions for what he sees as a greater good, and unlike a sociopath, it weighs on him. He keeps skirting the line from being above it, to being dragged down in it. “
Yep. Perfect example. And it’s in the superhero DNA, this idea of the hero standing apart from the government and breaking the law when he finds it necessary. Superman did it in his very first appearance in Action Comics No. 1.
Yesterday, after watching the first episode of DAREDEVIL, I googled daredevil+netflix+racism. What I found seem to suggest that the rest of the series would continue with the same Yellow Peril theme as the first episode. Plenty of racism in WW2 superhero comics, too.
This one looks kind of like a rip-off or homage:
https://fourcolorglasses.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/2012_1009_01.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#/media/File:Antisemiticroths.jpg
This cause me to notice that the interviewer described the killer/torturer as being motivated by “defending his community from outsiders”:
“A lot of times your neighborhood, your town, your city is being invaded by people who you think are going to hurt your family, your society, (…) I am part of a group that protects people, an autonomous group of people who protect their town, their people. (..) this is something that I can justify, because I am defending my family.”
Unfortunately, he is is not alone. Here in Denmark we have ‘Soldiers of Odin’. (for some reason, a LOT of extremists are into Odinism)
There’s Polish Defence League who protects ‘their women’ from dancing with muslim men:
http://www.thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/158678,AntiIslamic-group-patrols-clubs-to-protect-Polish-women
There is also the Hungarian Szebb Jövoért Polgáror Egyesület.
And this lovely bunch:
“at least ten Florida-based members armed and dressed in all black will patrol the city of Sanford every day, everywhere.”
This is, of course to protect “the white community”
Fox News actually endorse this ‘civil rights group’, even though they were nazies. (no, they were not just kinda nazi-like, but actual nazies.)
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/04/orlando-fox-affiliate-calls-neo-nazis-a-civil-rights-group/
Chris Gavaler, you wrote that “it’s in the superhero DNA, this idea of the hero standing apart from the government and breaking the law when he finds it necessary”.
Sometimes, sure. It fits like a glove with Frank Millers Batman. But Miller is kind of a fascist nutter, so this is expected.
On the other hand, a lot of other Batman stories shows Batman not as a replacement for a broken justice system, but as an extension of a functional one. If Batman was standing apart from the government, he would hardly come running when they flash the Bat-signal.
Remember what Gordon says in BATMAN: KILLING JOKE:
“I want him BROUGHT IN and I want him brought in by the BOOK! By the BOOK, you HEAR? We have to SHOW him! We have to show him that our way WORKS!”
Few noticed the sweet irony of a police commissioner saying this to a vigilante. At least, I sure didn’t notice back then. The reason I didn’t notice, I think, is that Batman doesn’t count as vigilante in these stories. Not really. There isn’t the same aggressive/desperate distrust in the justice system as the one seen in Millers Batman or real-life vigilantes.
Batman operates outside the law. But in the same stories, the justice system seem to works quite fine. The system works, so no call for any vigilante. It’s oil and water, and in those comics, it mixes just fine.
I mentioned earlier how Fox News called a group of actual nazies for a ‘civil rights group’. I had throught that clip was lost, since it was taken down from youtube on account on it being on a nazi youtube channel. But I discovered that I had actually saved it to my harddrive. So here it is:
the-missing-ink.org/Civil-rights-group-patrolling-Sanford(480p_H.264-AAC).flv
…that should have been a link. Trying again:
http://the-missing-ink.org/Civil-rights-group-patrolling-Sanford(480p_H.264-AAC).flv
The KKK recently left a recruitment flyer in my front yard, and I lectured the following week to my Superhero Comics class about how the Klan of the 1920s established the formula for superheroes in the 30s. I think superheroes mix fine with law enforcement only because the authors don’t want readers to think of superheroes as vigilantes–even when they are. Every time Gordon flashes the bat signal, he is admitting that he and his department can’t get the job done. Superhero stories require police and military to be inadequate. If the system is working, the superhero has no reason to be. Superheroes are romanticized vigilantes.
@Chris: you said: “I think superheroes mix fine with law enforcement only because the authors don’t want readers to think of superheroes as vigilantes–even when they are.”
This is kind of my point. At their core, superheroes are of course vigilantes. But some superhero stories moves so far away from the vigilantes core, that it’s hard to say if the term vigilante still applies.
A bit like the Axe Riddle from ‘John Dies at the End’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6J_O_BVOmU
I think Fleischers ‘The Mad Scientist’ cartoon easily could be moved to a fantasy setting. This would of course remove the vigilante element completely. But that element is already so subdued that its complete removal wouldn’t matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjdnCC6n4xk
Oxfords definition of a vigilante:
“A member of a self-appointed group of citizens who undertake law enforcement in their community without legal authority, typically because the legal agencies are thought to be inadequate.”
Let’s take a closer look at that definition:
Oxford: “group of citizens”
Superman (typically) works alone. He is (was?) not a member of a “group”. This is the area where I see the most major difference between real-life vigilantes and superheroes. But there is also something crazy about comparing a guy who can fly, have superhuman strength, x-ray vision and invulnerability, to compare this God-like creature to a ‘citizen’. He is a person, sure, but he is clearly something far away from our normal concept of ‘a citizen’.
Oxford: “undertake law enforcement in their community”
Superheroes do stop a guy from stealing an old lady purse, or they go after a serial killer. But a lot of times, their foes are so otherworldly that it seem a stretch to compare it to ordinary crimes. A mad scientist with a death ray is far outside our normal concept of criminal activity.
Oxford: “typically because the legal agencies are thought to be inadequate.”
In those Superman stories I have been reading, I never encountered this framing. The police was always competent, and not racists at all. The system works. With Frank Miller as the sole exception, I don’t recall any superhero story which justifies the Superheroes actions with that the legal system has somehow failed.
I think there is a great variation in how much power the vigilante element has in the different stories. And looking at this variation give more meaning that just saying that all superheroes are vigilantes.